


and love too will ruin us

by akaparalian



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst with a Happy Ending, M/M, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Sylvix Week (Fire Emblem)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-17
Updated: 2019-10-17
Packaged: 2020-12-20 22:04:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,138
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21063905
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akaparalian/pseuds/akaparalian
Summary: Sometimes marks come in gradually, fading into place over weeks or months or even years. Felix’s isn’t like that. He goes to sleep one night in his sixteenth year blissfully oblivious, and wakes up, horrified, knowing that his life is thoroughly ruined.





	and love too will ruin us

**Author's Note:**

> *rolls into soulmates prompt 2 days late with Starbucks*
> 
> This fic absolutely did not want to get finished in time and is, in fact, still not finished, but I finally hit a place that I felt was a decent temporary stopping point and I wanted to get something up, at least, so here we are!!!
> 
> Please note: **trigger warning** for brief, fairly non-graphic (at least by my thinking?) description/depiction of suicide. See more spoilery note at the end if you'd like clarification!
> 
> Title is from Scheherazade by Richard Siken.

Sometimes marks come in gradually, fading into place over weeks or months or even years. Felix’s isn’t like that. He goes to sleep one night in his sixteenth year blissfully oblivious, and wakes up, horrified, knowing that his life is thoroughly ruined.

No matter how long he scrubs his wrist, the thin, delicate skin growing raw under water and lye and wool, the words are still there. _Sylvian Jose Gautier._ He can feel them burning under his shirt-sleeves when he finally gives up on standing at his washbasin — they are there, immovable, and they are damning him. Mocking him, too, which rankles almost as badly, if he’s honest.

He stares resolutely at the wall to the left of his bed, refusing to look down at his wrist, refusing to even think about it in anything but the broadest, vaguest terms. He needs to dress and go downstairs; his father will be wondering where he is if he waits much longer, and he doesn’t want to attract attention. He needs to train, which means wearing his training gear; he’ll have to find some way to conceal his wrist, because like hell is he letting anyone else see _those_ words. He needs to get his racing heartbeat and gasping breaths under control; if he doesn’t, then everyone, every single person from here to the fucking Empire, will know that something is very wrong, and surely at least some of them will figure out _what_.

In the end, he wraps his wrists — both of them — in clean white linen. His father looks, hesitates, and says nothing. He starts wearing leather bracers and wrist guards when he trains. No one even seems to take notice. He wears gloves, though the sticky summer winds, even here in Faerghus, make it miserable to do so. He gets a few odd looks, but no comments. No one says anything. No one asks. Felix slips quietly into a new life, just like the old one except turned on its side, colored by the sure and unavoidable knowledge, burned into his skin, that he has a soulmate — and not only that, but his soulmate is…

Goddess, that _idiot_. That stupid bastard. This is, obviously, _his_ fault, and Felix is going to absolutely kill the shit out of him.

—

“Felix!” Sylvain calls cheerfully from across the courtyard of Garreg Mach. A very real part of Felix contemplates drawing his sword; another very real part considers turning and walking away and not stopping until he steps directly into the ocean.

Even for him, those options both seem overly dramatic. He ends up just scowling instead.

“Oh, don’t look at me like that,” Slyvain says, laughing, as he saunters over. He’s grinning; it’s disgusting, how easy and happy he looks, how already-settled, as though he’s been here forever instead of a day. Felix hates it, and especially hates how he looks in the stupid uniform, easy and insousciant and confident. 

“I’ll look at you however I like,” he says, but it’s automatic, almost rote, and Sylvain only wrinkles his nose at him lightly as he continues his approach. He claps Felix firmly on the shoulder and then drags him in for a one-armed hug, still laughing, still smiling. 

“Of course you will,” he sighs, shaking his head. “It’s only the occasion of your reunion with your oldest friend. I haven’t seen you in half a year, Felix, it’s been _ages_ — and now we’re living together! Aren’t I allowed to be excited? Just imagine all the trouble we’ll be able to get up to.”

“I’m fairly certain I met Ingrid before you,” Felix says, deadpan, “so really, if we’re talking about _oldest_ —”

“You can’t keep doing this, our fathers _both_ back me up!” Sylvain protests, leaning back to whack him on the arm. “Saints, Felix, one of these days I’m going to get the idea you really mean it, that you love Ingrid more than me.”

“Why wouldn’t he mean it?” Ingrid asks archly from somewhere behind Felix, swooping in like a goddess-be-damned angel to Felix’s direct and immediate rescue, and he’s able to just shoot Sylvain a smirk and duck out from under his arm and make his escape as the two of them start arguing. His heart is pounding so loudly that he can feel it in his throat.

He wanders toward the training grounds, one of the few places at the monastery where he’s been able to feel truly calm, so far — but then, that’s no surprise when the training yard was always his favorite place back home, too. Maybe a few hours of going after straw-filled training dummies or any living person stupid enough to cross swords with him when he’s in this mood will do him some good. Maybe he’ll even be able to think about the way Sylvain had looked in the sunlight, the way his sleeves were shoved casually up to his elbows to reveal his muscular forearms — and his horribly, horribly bare wrists — the way Felix’s stupid, worthless, traitorous heart had constricted in his chest at the sight of him. Maybe he’ll be able to at least pretend that he’s feeling something close to normal.

—

Sleep is hard to come by at Garreg Mach, and it doesn’t really seem to be getting any easier as classes start up and the days start to tick by one by one. Felix can sleep on the road, or in camp, and of course he can sleep in his own room at Castle Fraldarius, but the monastery is… well, something about it unsettles him. He’s not used to it here yet, and he feels constantly on edge in ways he doesn’t when he’s on the road with his father and his men. He at least trusts them to watch his back, or anyway he trusts them enough that he’s able to sleep without feeling that he’ll wake to a knife between his ribs. He doesn’t expect to be killed in his sleep here in the monastery either, not really, but he’s still on edge enough that he struggles to sleep.

If he’s more short-tempered than normal, he’s sure only Ingrid, Sylvain, and the Boar stand a chance of noticing; the others don’t know him well enough yet, and he hasn’t exactly been warm and fuzzy with them so far. His training and performance don’t suffer appreciably — he knows how to work well on little sleep — so, for the most part, he decides not to address the problem at all. Either it will go away on its own, or it will get bad enough that he’ll have to deal with it, but for now, he can get away with stubbornly ignoring it, so of course that’s what he does.

Still, he’s not exactly interested in spending his nights tossing, turning, or staring listlessly up at the ceiling of his unfamiliar, impersonal dorm room. It takes only a few nights of sleeplessness before he decides that he doesn’t give a single flying fuck about the supposed punishments for leaving the dorms after curfew — Shamir, he thinks, is the only one who might stand a chance of catching him, and she seems like the type to think curfews are ridiculous, so he’ll take his chances — and slips out of his room sometime after midnight.

The place is obviously quieter at night, but it’s less intense, too, the lush green lawns and carefully-tended buildings washed pale in the moonlight. It’s still not home — not the northern forests and old gray castles of his childhood — but at least it’s not so aggressively welcoming and warm, or whatever it is that the church is going for. He doesn’t quite feel settled, but it’s closer than he’s been since he got here.

He starts going out at night a lot.

He’d train, but he worries about making that much noise; he might not be overly concerned about getting caught, but he certainly doesn’t want to actively attract the attention of every single person at the monastery. He does go to the library sometimes, because even if he can’t train, he can at least get some reading done. He crosses paths with Lindhart there a few times, and Claude once or twice. There is one night where he sees the Boar and immediately turns on his heel and walks away, but other than that, the library is usually quiet.

But he doesn’t always feel like bending his head over a book, especially when he’s already feeling restless. There are plenty of nights where he just walks circles around the monastery. He learns the back alleys and shortcuts quickly, which is added insurance when he needs to duck out of sight to avoid guards or knights making the rounds, and it means he can make it from place to place quicker during the day, too, which means he can spend more time on the things that actually matter, like training or studying, and less time just walking to class.

If it also means he’s at lower risk of running into Sylvain during the normal course of his days, well, then that’s… just an added benefit.

He hasn’t been too transparently obvious — at least, he hopes he hasn’t. He doesn’t exactly spend a lot of time socializing, but he tries not to be cold during class or whenever he _does_ run into Sylvain, and unless he’s an even better actor then Felix gives him credit for — which would be saying something — Sylvain’s showing no signs of having noticed anything out of the ordinary. Nobody, in fact, seems to have noticed anything at all, or at least if they have, they haven’t been willing to comment on it.

It’s not as hard as Felix might have imagined to conceal his wrist at Garreg Mach. Perhaps he should have known better than to worry at all; it’s common among the nobility, after all, to ignore and conceal the existence of a soulmate unless that person is, coincidentally, a prudent, beneficial match. He’s not the only one with a covered wrist, though most, admittedly, are covered more gracefully than his own. The Boar Prince himself has a gorgeous leather wrist cuff in a deep, rich lack, and one of the Empire girls keeps her wrist wrapped in a cherry-red ribbon, tied in a bow as though it were a gift. But even so, Felix would have thought that he and his bandaged wrist would at the very least get some attention from those who know him, if not from the masses. But Ingrid has asked exactly once, and had only nodded when he rebuffed her; and though the Boar’s eyes linger on Felix’s wrist from time to time, he never says a word; and Sylvain, whom he had been most worried about for a cornucopia of reasons, has never even seemed to notice at all.

Felix is no fool, and no matter what he might say, he knows that Sylvain isn’t, either. He’s sure his wrist hasn’t _actually_ escaped Sylvain’s notice; the blithe ignorance, like so many other things, is pure artifice, a mask designed to conceal… something. _What_ is a mystery, and that much is worrying, but at the very least, it’s easy enough to put out of his mind from day to day when Sylvain and everyone else seem just as willing to ignore his wrist as he is.

Regardless, he doesn’t have to worry about anyone noticing his wrist at night; he even goes out without his wrists covered, once or twice, though that feels like daring himself to do something stupid than anything else. He loses out on a few hours of poor-quality sleep, maybe, but at least walking around at night gives him some time to himself in a place where the world actually seems quiet.

Until, of course, Sylvain has to go and cock that up, too.

—

“Felix!”

He freezes. It’s midnight, or past midnight, and the late-autumn air is foggy, a shroud of mist hanging low over the monastery and draping everything in white. If he’s lucky, he can duck out of sight, and surely —

“Felix, hey!”

No, he couldn’t be so lucky. Felix turns around, shoulders stiff, already certain of more or less exactly what he’ll find, and sure enough: there is Sylvain, perched on a ledge up above him, his feet dangling off. There’s an uncorked bottle beside him — wine, it looks like — which would explain how loudly he’s yelling, as well as the dark flush high on the apples of his cheeks.

This is the first time, in his nightly wanderings, that Felix has come to the Goddess Tower. He mentally strikes it off the list of places he will ever visit again.

“Shut up, you moron,” Felix hisses up at him, his own voice carrying through the night louder than he’d like, echoing in his ears. “You’re going to get us both caught.”

“Come up here!” Sylvain whisper-shouts back down to him — not actually all that much quieter, though it seems he’s at least trying. Felix sighs, resigned, and only glances around quickly to make sure Sylvain hasn’t _actually_ drawn a horde of guards down upon their heads before he quickly scrambles up onto the ledge.

“What are you doing out here?” he mutters, eyeing the bottle of wine with some suspicion and making sure to leave a healthy cushion of personal space between the two of them. Tonight, at least, he hadn’t given in to the reckless, adrenaline-seeking urge to leave his wrists uncovered, though he does tug at the linen wrappings unconsciously, a nervous action that Sylvain luckily seems too drunk to pick up on.

“I got dumped,” Sylvain tells him, with a sort of blithe cheerfulness that Felix almost feels like he should find worrying. He makes a small, wordless noise, trying to convey as little interest or emotion as possible, but of course Sylvain takes it as an invitation to continue regardless.

“It would be bad enough if it was just the standard thing,” he says; he leans back, putting his weight on his hands and tipping his head up to the sky, and Felix determinedly does not examine the arch of his neck and the tantalizing bob of his Adam’s apple. “But lately it’s been all this… you know…”

He gestures expressively, then looks over at Felix with a wide-eyed, furrowed-brow expression that makes it clear he’s hoping Felix will help him out with navigating his own train of thought. It’s ridiculous. _Sylvain_ is ridiculous. None of this is making Felix’s heart pound at all. 

Felix could be reading right now. Or — strength training, something quieter than the clang of practice weapons but still useful. Or even just staring at a brick wall. _Anything_ would be a better, less horrifying use of his time than this.

But finally, in the face of Sylvain’s increasingly pouty expression, he relents. “I don’t know,” he grits out. “You’re going to have to tell _me_, not the other way around, you dolt.”

Sylvain grins at that like he thinks _dolt_ is a term of endearment. Maybe he does. Maybe he’s _that_ drunk — though a dubious glance at the bottle of wine confirms that it’s not even empty. 

“Oh, you _know_,” he says again, then laughs when Felix glowers at him, loud and full-bodied like he doesn’t care _at all _if they get caught. He probably doesn’t, the jackass; he probably thinks he could just talk his way out of it, and worst of all, he’s probably right. “Just — oh, Felix, you’ve got a crest too, right? You’ve gotta know about — the girls — the way they —”

He gestures again, in a way that Felix would normally guess has something to do with breasts, except Sylvain looks too distraught for that. Still, he _does_ get the point — though that seems more a miracle than anything to do with the clarity of Sylvain’s gesticulation.

“I don’t have that problem as much as you do,” Felix mutters, and Sylvain’s face falls a little. “Oh, don’t look at me like — it’s not _my _fault women like you more than me. Isn’t that a _good_ thing?”

“Not when all they want ‘sthe stupid — dumb crest,” Sylvain says, slurring a little and tapping the center of his chest with one finger. “Except that’s what I’m saying, it’s not even just the crest anymore, now it’s the stupid—”

And then he does something that makes Felix wish, more than anything else has so far, that he’d simply ignored Sylvain calling out to him and gone on his merry fucking way, fully prepared to tell Sylvain he’d imagined the whole thing if he asked and hope he’s drunk enough that he would actually believe that. Sylvain traces over his wrist with one finger — his bare, pale, creamy wrist, and he says, “It’s all this soulmate shit now, too, you know? All this — stuff with marks, and. And no one wants to believe I don’t _have_ one.”

Felix can’t breathe. The words on his own wrist — Sylvain’s fucking name, in Sylvain’s fucking handwriting, because Sylvain is his _fucking soulmate_ — seem to burn, and he only very barely manages to resist the urge to touch them.

“What do you mean?” he chokes out, certain that he must have somehow misunderstood. But Sylvain just tips his head to the side to give him a baleful look.

“C’mon,” he says. “Don’t you do it, too.” 

“I’m not _doing_ anything,” Felix snaps, glaring at him. “I’m just trying to figure out what the hell you’re _talking_ about!”

Sylvain doesn’t seem to get why this might be freaking him out — doesn’t seem to get, at all, that Felix’s entire world has just been turned on its end, because it’s one thing to know he’s not Sylvain’s soulmate, one thing to assume he’s — somehow been hiding that he’s got another name, _fuck_, Felix doesn’t know, but Sylvain sounds pretty damn certain about the fact that he doesn’t have a soulmate _at all_, and that — 

Suddenly Felix wishes _he_ were the one who had downed most of a bottle of wine before having this conversation. This is _bullshit._

“‘S not complicated, Felix,” Sylvain says, rolling his eyes. “Come on, you’ve seen that my wrist is bare. I don’t go around trying to hide it, trying to pretend I’ve got something _to_ hide. What did you think?”

“Plenty of people have bare wrists,” Felix says, his whole body vibrating with tense, nervous energy. “It doesn’t mean—”

“Don’t be an idiot,” Sylvain cuts him off, the words suddenly sounding much clearer, all traces of alcohol gone from his voice. “You’re forgetting I’m older than you. Older than most of the kids here.”

“That doesn’t mean you—” Felix starts, but this time he cuts himself off. He still feels disbelief more than anything, but now it’s joined by a sense of creeping doubt. Sylvain has a point about age, or at least part of a point; it’s not ironclad, but there is a lot of conventional wisdom that says that if you haven’t received your mark by eighteen or so, your odds decrease rapidly from year to year. “You’re not that much older than us. There’s still _time_. Don’t write yourself off to be dramatic, you bastard.”

All at once, the wind seems to go out of Sylvain’s sails. He glances over at Felix, eyes luminous in the moonlight, and then quickly looks away. He flops backward onto the ground and flings a hand over his face.

“I don’t know,” he mutters. “_Is_ there time? And even if there is — I don’t think all the time in the world will help me.”

“Shut up,” Felix says, but his voice is wavering, uncertain; he’s not comfortable at all with the sudden shift in tone. The intensity of Sylvain’s mood swing is honestly a little frightening to him, and it makes him wonder which is the truest emotion, the crux of the issue: the anger, the dismissiveness and derision, or this new, gut-wrenching dejection which is dripping from Sylvain’s voice? “You’re being ridiculous.”

“Easy for you to say,” Sylvain says. He lifts the hand from over his eyes for just long enough to glance — Felix stiffens — directly at Felix’s wrists. They’re still safely wrapped in linen, but Felix almost flinches anyway. 

“Nothing about it is _easy_,” Felix mutters, but Sylvain more or less ignores him. There’s a moment of silence, the only sound the night breeze whistling through the towers of the monastery and rustling the leaves of the carefully-tended breeze. And then Sylvain makes a low, hurt noise and rolls away so that his back is to Felix.

“I think I’m just not meant to be happy,” he whispers, and Felix distinctly feels his heart pound. This is ridiculous — _Sylvain_ is ridiculous, and he’s drunk and maudlin and even _he_ will be embarrassed to have been talking like this once he’s sobered up. Felix should say something cutting and walk away, should end this right now, but he doesn’t. He _can’t._

He stares off the edge of the tower and says nothing, absolutely nothing. His head is spinning, and he knows without a doubt that though if he opens his mouth, he’ll vomit.

If Sylvain is right — and Felix still isn’t convinced he is, though the thought is so terrible as to somehow be compelling by its very nature — but if he’s right… It makes sense, in an odd, terrible way. Felix is cold and aloof and destined to be in love forever and never have that love returned; Sylvain is warm and outgoing and destined to never find love with anyone, at least not _true_ love. They’ve both been fucked over by something they cannot hope to ever understand — some act of fate, or of the goddess, or of heaven only knows what.

Felix makes a noise low in his throat quite without meaning to, a wordless noise of distress, and Sylvain finally rolls over and looks up, the motion catching in Felix’s peripheral.

“Sorry,” Sylvain says, his voice still rough and quiet. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.” He pauses. “I’m not up here because — I just thought it would be quiet. A place to get away. I wasn’t going to…”

Goddess, Felix hadn’t even _thought_ of that, and now it’s all he _can_ think of: Sylvain on the ground at the base of the tower, Sylvain under a white shroud in the cathedral. The urge to vomit redoubles; he’s seen battle and gore enough times, but death has only touched him so personally as that on a few rare occasions, and it would be an incredible understatement to say that he doesn’t handle it well. Glenn’s death had warped and hardened him; his mother’s had made him quiet. Sylvain’s, here, now, would destroy him.

“Of course not,” he says. He is astonished that the words don’t come out coated in bile. “You promised. _We _promised.”

“I promised,” Sylvain echoes. “Right. I may not have a soulmate, but at least I’ve got you, right, Felix?”

He laughs humorlessly, the sound dark and bitter, and the sound of it cuts like a knife. He doesn’t know — he has no idea, of course he doesn’t, because Felix has made sure of it. But, Goddess, it burns to hear him say that.

“You’ve got me,” Felix says, ears still ringing, cheeks still smarting. It sounds hollow and bitter to his own ears, but Sylvain doesn’t seem to notice. He just hums softly, noncommittal, and turns away again, and Felix wants _so badly_ to punch him, or scream at him, or — or — 

Or nothing — nothing at all, except, of course, to get up and leave him, wordlessly. Sylvain doesn’t seem to notice this, either, or if he does, he at least doesn’t say anything about it as Felix levers himself to his feet as quickly and quietly as possible, trying to pretend his legs aren’t shaking and unsteady. Felix leaves Sylvain there, lying with his legs dangling off of an odd little ledge of the Goddess Tower, and makes it all the way back to the dormitories before his knees give out.

—

He wakes up the next morning feeling simultaneously ridiculous and vindicated. As always, regardless of his late-night wanderings, he wakes up with the first fingers of dawn light creeping over the horizon, and he’s out of his room and halfway to the training grounds well before the sun is truly up.

Sylvain comes in late to breakfast — late, and distinctly rumpled, as though he didn’t exactly end up sleeping the night in a bed. Ingrid, several seats down from Felix, asks with an arched brow if he was _out_ the night before; Sylvain doesn’t make any real attempt to explain himself at all, just laughs, and on the other side of the table and several feet away, Felix says nothing, either, keeping his head bowed over his eggs.

**Author's Note:**

> Note on content warning: While drunk and upset, Sylvain reassures Felix that he doesn't intend to commit suicide. Felix is briefly horrified and contemplates what that might be like.
> 
> Come find me on [Twitter!](http://twitter.com/akaparalian)


End file.
